Everything rim
Rumors of Reseach In Motion's iconic BlackBerry Messenger app wriggling its way over to iPhone may be coming to an end. Anonymous sources have claimed that new CEO Thorsten Heins shut down the idea of licensing BlackBerry Messenger to carriers and manufacturers as soon as he stepped in, and was actually against RIM doing any kind of licensing at all. Apparently the issue was "not up for discussion", according to the source. It's unfortunate that he made that call early on, considering he openly admitted to looking into licensing deals during the last quarterly conference call. Ex co-CEO Jim Balsillie was previously rumored to champion BBM on other platforms, a project which new sources claimed was called SMS 2.0 internally. They had even acquired a small company called LiveProfile to work on it.
NPD recently published the results of their Q1 2012 mobile PC market research, and as you might expect, Apple's iPad has dominated competing mobile PC manufacturers. Again. After shipping 17.2 million iPads in the quarter, Apple has claimed 22.5% market share, compared to HP's 11.6%, Acer's 9% and Lenovo's 7.7%. Among tablet manufacturers, the iPad commanded 62.8% market share, followed by Samsung with 7.5%, Amazon with 4%, and RIM tied with ASUS with 2.3%.
RIM recently proposed a new nano-SIM card design to counter one proposal made by Apple to the the European Telecommunications Standards Instititute.
Just in case we needed any more convincing that people love their iPhones, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has found through recent surveys that Apple's smartphones are leaving customers the happiest. The iPhone scored 83 on their system, compared to to Nokia, LG and HTC who are all tied at 75.
At BlackBerry World 2012, RIM has finally given us a sneak preview of their next generation BlackBerry 10 operating system. It won't be released until later in 2012, likely pitting it head-to-head against iOS 6 and iPhone 5,1, and a lot can change, but here's some of what we've seen so far:
RIM Australia has confirmed that it was responsible for the flashmob attack on a Sydney Apple Store.
Some additional investigation into the "Wake Up" flashmob that happened at Australia Apple stores last week reveal it may actually be BlackBerry and Research In Motion behind the stunt.
Rumor has it that RIM's recently-resigned co-CEO and board member, Jim Balsillie, sought a drastic plan to open up their infrastructure to wireless service providers, and allow competing platforms, like iOS, to run data through it. That would enable many signature BlackBerry services, namely BBM, to run on iPhone.
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion today launched their first iPhone app. It's nothing particularly flashy, as you might expect, but Mobile Fusion marks their foray into cross-platform enterprise device management.
Despite offering to license the nano-SIM standard royalty-free, Apple is getting flak from RIM for recruiting additional proxies in the voting process. Nokia had made similar complaints when Apple initially made the proposal to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
